Create Books for the IPad

ePub Bud is a free tool for creating books for the iPad. It does this in a number of ways. Either you can send a book to the company and they say they will digitize it for free, you can upload an existing digital copy and it will be converted on the site, or you can use the WYSIWYG interface to write straight into the site.

I tried uploading my Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers manual from the PDF format and this is what it came out like. You can download it from here if you are lucky enough to have an iPad Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers iPad edition

The process of uploading it was pretty simple. Once you are registered you just click on 'Upload', locate the file in the usual way and click again to upload it. Once the file is uploaded, it takes a short while to convert it to the format for iPad.

When it has been converted the status will change from 'unprocessed' to 'Converted to ePub'. You can then share the link with anyone who wants to read your materials or book on their iPad. You can set privacy status on the file and add tabs and index it. You can even edit the file once it's uploaded using the on site WYSIWYG.

This is a great way to convert content for use on the iPad. It doesn't have to be books of course, you could also use it for worksheets, or notes for your students or books or stories they have created themselves.

It's also worth checking out the books that are already there too as there is quite a collection. The focus seems to be mainly on children's books at the moment. Have a look in the 'browse' section and see if anything takes your fancy.

Now all you need is an iPad!

Related links:

• Free ebooks on elearning
• Free Web Publishing Community
• Fantastic Free E-Books for EFL and ELT

Best

Nik Peachey

Turn Feeds into a PDF Newsletter

I've just found this quick and easy tool for converting a blog or website feed (or feeds) into a simple PDF newsletter. This is ideal if you want to share information with your non-techy colleagues or grab texts for use with students.
All you do is go to the Tabbloid website, click on 'Get Started', paste in the feed address and click on generate. The newsletter is created in 'tabloid' style and you can either email it to yourself or colleagues or just save it to your computer (in which case you don't even need to add an email address).

It's very simple, but also quite limited in that hyperlinks and images are lost and there's no customisation (would be nice to add your own title or headline), but it does enable you to combine any number of feeds into one simple document, so if you wanted to share and print content from a number of blogs to share around then this could be ideal. Here's an example that I created using the feed from my Daily English Activities blog

• Daily English Activities Newsletter.

Hope you find this useful.

Related links:

• 1 Minute Listening Activity
• Creating a personal homepage
• Free Web Publishing Community
• Fantastic Free E-Books for EFL and ELT

Best

Nik Peachey

Fantastic Free E-Books for EFL and ELT

Wow! This is like having a complete ELT library at your finger tips and it's all free! PDF Geni is search site that gives you free access to PDF e-books all of which are freely available on the web.

It isn't limited to ELT and can be used to search for any subject. I had a look for a few things which might be useful for EFL / ESL teachers and found loads of free materials.

Check out these searches:

• Communicative language teaching
• TEFL
• Lexical approach
• Task based learning
• Teaching English

This is really useful stuff and all free.

Visit PDF Geni

Best

Nik Peachey